REM Learning

Moukia led us to a metal stairway, heading down to some kind of underground area of the manor. My ears were still in a bad way, but Yuri claimed he could hear some sort of machinery in the walls. I might have been skeptical if I didn’t feel the vibrations.

“What do you think’s down here?” I asked Yuri, switching sides with him so he would talk into my good ear.

“I don’t know,” he repeated his answer after we switched positions. “And I wish we weren’t going to figure it out.”

That was fair for a normie, but all this excitement had me feeling pretty pepped up. If something crazy wasn’t down here, I think I’d be disappointed.

“I bet it’s some kind of evil scientist's lair,” I snickered. “Like, what if he’s been experimenting on all the people who’ve gone missing? Shit would be raw if we found it.”

“Why do you sound excited about that?” Yuri raised a brow.

“Never said it made me happy. Just that it would make coming down here worth it. Plus, you know how much publicity we’d get for exposing this?”

“It’s a little messed up to think like that, don’t you agree?” Yuri asked.

“Oh, bite me. You make it sound like my head wasn’t already messed up to begin with.”

Scavenging had made me pretty thick skinned to how gruesome things could get in the world. It wasn’t something for the faint of heart, and you were most likely going to run into weirdos who probably belonged in an insane asylum. Meeting good people like Yuri and Olga was rare. I guess on a scale of normie to psycho, I was probably just a bit demented, but still sane.

I wasn’t just thinking about money here though. I had no love for my competition, but I wasn’t about to let someone with a lot of power think he could abuse others like me for some twisted experiments… Assuming that was what was going on down here.

And to think fear wasn’t messing with me at all, causing me to worry we might be getting ourselves deeper into a mess that no two people would be able to clean up alone, was ridiculous. I just kept my purpose at the forefront of my mind, and that was my shop and how it was all to take care of my brother, not letting the fear consume me. It kept me going, reminding me that every step I was taking was all for him. Maybe this was just me coping with stress, but Yuri had similar motivations pushing him forward.

***

We’d been walking down the stares for a while. It was tiring work, especially since we were dealing with crazy strong anticipation.

“What is with all the goddamn stairs…?” I grunted, trying to tough through my sore feet.

“I think I hear something coming up.” Yuri’s tired words gave me a little hope.

An elevator graced my sight, causing me to cheer and run into it.

“They could have put this thing a little higher up,” I said. “Like, it would have saved us a lot of energy. What sorta rich guy would want to walk all the way down here?”

They say the guy who owned this manor was the head of an iron works, but unless he was pumping iron out himself, this just seemed ridiculous.

“The stairs are probably a means to deter anyone from finding their secret,” Yuri mentioned.

“Yeah, right.”

The elevator was a much more pleasant ride, but slow and a little shaky. Not enough to give me a sinking feeling in my stomach, but enough to draw up a slight nerve to keep me on edge.

When it finally stopped and opened, we were in some sort of laboratory hallway… Something that felt like a hospital, but more creepy and dark. The lighting in it was minimalist and a cold blue color, occasionally flickering like the power was waning.

“Woah…” I said, peeking my head out and looking both ways, half expecting to see an alien scurrying around. “You got anything on this?” I asked Yuri.

He said something, but a sharp ringing in my left ear prevented me from understanding, so I adjusted my position.

“Not much more than you,” Yuri repeated. “Could it be the government's work?”

That wouldn’t surprise me if this was related to them. The iron works guy who owned this house worked closely with the Feds to make bots, so maybe this was his little man cave where he brought a piece of work back home.

The hallway looked pretty empty, but we stayed alert for any bots, especially those spiders.

There was a room at the end of the hall emanating green light. We gravitated toward it, but it was giving me a bad feeling. Yuri and I both braced ourselves for whatever was inside.

Metal pods were scattered around that room, all connected by tubes to a giant computer looking thing with a bunch of randomly blinking lights. Each blink caused a beep sound, making an orchestra of off note tones that added to the softly eerie atmosphere.

Those pods were empty. Viewports into their cold interiors revealed a humanoid shape.

“Holy shit…” I put my hand over the glass and brushed away the condensation. “These are people… Like, they’re actually inside these things.”

This one had a man. His body was thin and emaciated, likely supported only by a breathing mask and several IV’s hooked up to his arms and torso. Most odd was the strange helmet set up on his heads that covered over his eyes.

Yuri was looking at one that contained a woman. She was in the same shape as this guy was.

“You’re mad scientist theory might not be very off,” he said.

“You know I was joking, right?”

I hated that out of everything I’ve ever said, that happened to be my clairvoyant moment.

Yuri got to work cracking the computer systems. It was giving him a hard time, but the less stressful environment made it a bit easier for him to hack it proper.

“They're not dead,” Yuri assured. “Well, most of them aren’t. I can see all their vital signs here.”

He showed me that almost three quarters of the people locked up in here were in some sort of stasis, preventing them from waking up or interacting with the outside world.

“What’s happening to them?” I asked.

“You see that big computer there?” Yuri pointed to the machine with hundreds of randomly blinking lights. “It’s a neural network connected to all their brains through those helmets. From what I can see, there’s some sort of AI being fed information directly from these people.”

“Like, is it reading their minds?”

“Sort of,” he said as he opened up a menu on the screen that displayed the helmet. “This device is interfacing with all of their heads and causing them to stay in a perpetual state of rem sleep.”

“That’s when people are dreaming, yeah?”

“Yes. I don’t know much about it, but this helmet is supposedly drawing out information through those dreams.”

I asked if he could get access to whatever information the computer was drawing out, but he couldn’t get into the big computer to find out.

“Is Ben and Sadie here?” I asked.

Yuri was one step ahead of me, pointing to the pod labeled with a ‘58’ on it. Apparently that was Ben. Sadie however wasn’t here.

“Maybe there’s another room,” I suggested.

“Possibly, but I don’t see anything on this,” he said, suddenly looking closely at the screen he’d been messing with. “Wait… No… She is in one… But it’s in another room on the floor above us.”

Then it looked like we needed to get them both out of this mess and get em’ home.

“Can we get them out of these?” I asked.

“I could, but some of these people are in terrible condition. Ben will wake up and be fine after some time, but others haven’t seen the light of day for nearly fourteen years.”

Fourteen years would put this facility in the pre-war era… 2005 to be exact. That meant that the Feds had been pulling some freaky shit down here for a while.

“We only came for Ben and Sadie,” I said. “We’ll get them out of here, then we’ll tell the authorities back in the city to come check this place out. They can deal with the rest.”

“You sure you want to leave all the others?” Yuri asked.

“If you feel like dragging around a bunch of half alive corpses, feel free to do whatever you want,” I turned to the machine. “I want nothing more than to smash that super brain scanner computer thing to bits, but this is over our heads.”

“You don’t seem like the type to leave this place without leaving a mess.”

I whipped out some spray cans and gave them a shake.

“Who said I wasn’t going to leave a mess? They already know we’re here, so it’s not like I can’t have a little fun…”